Tony Visconti

Tony Visconti was the producer on the debut album and Acquiring the Taste. He also played recorder, bass drum, and triangle on Acquiring the Taste, and wrote the "Tall Tale" in the debut album's liner notes.

Interview with TeamRock.com

Gentle Giant's debut album was one of Visconti's favorite projects. From TeamRock.com, June 10, 2016:

"The first Gentle Giant album. Wherever I go I'm always surprised when someone will recognise me in the street, approach me and say 'I love Gentle Giant'. This completes it, because no one loved Gentle Giant back in the day except the people who made that record. Even the label was quite disappointed because it was art-rock. But I felt I needed to do that, I needed to work with musicians of that calibre because I studied classical music, I trained hard, and this was very, very challenging. We were working with analogue tape and they were doing things that, honestly, you would have required Protools to pull off. And Protools hadn't been invented. So we did some tricks that were akin to what George Martin and The Beatles were doing with analogue tape, and made a fantastic work of art. I'm very pleased the group stayed together, the album was promoted and eventually did sell, because the initial sales were very disappointing, maybe only a few hundred. Even the artwork was brilliant. I got my friend George Underwood, David Bowie's friend from Bromley days, to do the artwork. This was, on every level one of the best albums I was ever involved with. Even as recently as this year, Holy Holy and I were doing gigs all over the United States and at least three fans came up afterwards and said how much they loved Gentle Giant. I'm so glad I can talk about it, because if no one heard this album, it wouldn't be worth discussing.

"I love that album, and album two, Acquiring The Taste, which was in many ways better than the first one, but Gentle Giant, the first one, was my favourite because we broke so much fresh ground on that one. It was so innovative."